


Elegy

by jujuberry136



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-20
Updated: 2011-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 12:32:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujuberry136/pseuds/jujuberry136
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My name is Spencer Reid, I am twenty-nine years old, I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigations in the Behavioral Analysis Unit.  My brain is leaking.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elegy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2010 [](http://community.livejournal.com/cm_exchange/profile)[**cm_exchange**](http://community.livejournal.com/cm_exchange/) fic exchange. Thanks to [](http://ambrosia4all.livejournal.com/profile)[**ambrosia4all**](http://ambrosia4all.livejournal.com/) my fabulous beta for cheerleading and pointing out my inconsistencies (and betaing her own thank you line). 

It was dark, cramped, and there was something moving behind one of the walls. Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t a monster…but his brain wasn’t cooperating in the face of the enveloping darkness.

It wasn’t the same as the darkness he hated in the woods. There the trees cast long shadows, with opportunities for who knows what to be hiding. The wind howls around the underbrush and whispers through leaves, rustling leaves and startling animals. At night, the woods can be simultaneously a cacophony of sound and silent as the dead.

But this was different.

This was heavy and airless. Even knowing the room had the average measurements of a pre-World War II closet, he couldn’t shake the idea that his lower body had disappeared somewhere into the dark. This was being unable to move, even an inch, to assure himself that the scratching sounds weren’t rats exploring the new addition to their home. Rattus norvegicus carry Weil’s disease, cryptosporidosis, viral hemorrhagic fevor, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, coxiella brunetti, toxoplasma gondii … and the scratching had moved up towards his head.

This was trapped trapped trapped trapped….

Reid breathed in deeply, drinking in the fetid and dark air unhappily.

“What is real?” he asked himself aloud, falling back easily onto the question that helped him separate his mother’s delusions from reality. “My name is Spencer Reid, I am twenty-nine years old, I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigations in the Behavioral Analysis Unit. My brain is leaking.”

Wait, that part wasn’t right. Why had he said that?

He took another breath and started again.

“My name is Spencer Reid, I am twenty-nine years old, I work for the FBI in the BAU. My head is sticky and it hurts, it is reasonable to assume I have a head injury. The incidence of new head injuries is 300 cases per 100,000 people per year, with mortality in 25 per 100,000 of those cases.”

Reid frowned. He was missing something, something just beyond his grip. He closed his eyes to focus, to look inward as he’d done so many times in the past. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t even cover his eyes.

Oh, that was it.

He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “My name is Spencer Reid, I am twenty-nine years old, I work for the FBI in the BAU. I have a head injury and my hands are bound.” Reid moved his wrists experimentally. “My hands are bound behind my back with metal — most likely handcuffs.”

It was an unfortunate moment for clarity to return. Reid pushed the sudden knowledge of the descriptions of the bruise patterns that matched standard issue handcuffs on each of the victim’s wrists from his mind and started to test the boundaries of his confinement.

He was cramped, that much was obvious from the throbbing of his bad knee. His legs were unencumbered and free to explore, though he only moved a few inches before the sole of his left foot ran afoul of what appeared to be a loose nail. Wonderful, now his foot was wet.

Where had his shoes gone anyway?

He’d updated his tetanus shot when he was shot, right? Ignore the pain in his foot; don’t think about the last time his foot was bare and bleeding in a dark cabin.

Focus. He needed to focus.

“My name is Spencer Reid, my hands are bound, I have a brain injury, I have injured my foot, and I have been left in a cramped rectangular space — dimensions suggest a closet or some other storage unit.”

He frowned; _why_ was he in a closet? The handcuffs suggested it was involuntary (that time after he successfully defended his second dissertation notwithstanding). His pounding headache and the slow trickle of blood making its way down his cheekbones confirmed.

So whose closet was he in? And how did he get there?

He was beginning to reconsider his opposition to Garcia’s most recent campaign to implant tracking chips in the team. His mother would no doubt be horrified, but Reid was beginning to see the upsides to the government tracking his every movement. Right now, for example, knowing that it would likely be a matter of hours for his team to come to the rescue would be a great relief.

It had taken them more than forty-eight hours to find him the last time he’d been abducted, but he wasn’t going to last that long. Not here in the dark. Not without the Dilaudad.

A profiler’s best weapon is the profile, Gideon liked to say. But right now Reid would settle for a flashlight. Or a gun. Hell, he’d even take a sharp stick.

His leg cramped suddenly, causing his foot to spasm against the nail once more. Though the new cut hurt, the realization that occurred was almost as bad. He was an idiot.

He turned awkwardly in the small space, knees hitting his chin as he folded over himself to maneuver inch by inch to the loose nail. He started turning it back and forth slowly. He’d been able to pick a lock with a paperclip for over a decade now, a nail was less familiar but necessity is the mother of all invention.

The nail was stubborn, but now that he had a focus Spencer could be patient. As the nail slowly rose from the wood, memories swam back into focus.

Morgan and Rossi were interviewing the parents of the latest victim, attempting to find some relationship, some commonality with the other four victims. The case had been decidedly strange—victims appeared to be chosen by random, abducted from public spaces as if the unsub was devolving, but each victim had been carefully positioned after death. It had been familiar, but he hadn’t been able to place it. Hotch had sent him to re-interview the witness who’d discovered the first body. But he’d stopped.

He remembered seeing a house and each crime scene photo flashed quickly through his mind — the first victim, Steven Wright, posed with a mirror; the second victim, Ashley Kolowitz, a stuffed cow tucked almost tenderly underneath her arm; the third victim, Issac Hellerman, his hands encased in plaster; the fourth victim, Erin Benoit, wrapped in golden fabric. It had been so blindingly clear he stomped on the breaks instinctively.

Ovid’s Metamorpheses as interpreted by a serial offender. Narcissus and his reflection, Europa and the bull, Glaucus and Circe, Jason and Medea—tales of love gone wrong and the transformation of man as a result.

The house hadn’t stood out from the neighborhood. The profile, limited as it was, had suggested the unsub was organized enough to not stand out and in this town that meant proper care of the lawn and exterior. But the laurel tree in the front yard had caught his eye. Specifically, the woman carved into the trunk of the tree, her arms lifted up towards the sky blending into the tree branches.

Daphne.

It was only after he found himself ringing the doorbell that he thought to wonder if he should call Hotch. But by then the door had opened and it was too late.

The nail felt unnaturally small in his fingers now that it was finally loose of the floorboards. If Morgan were here, he’d probably be able to tell Reid what type of nail it was—asphalt, brass tack, bullethead, canoe tack, carpet tack, coil, coffin, flathead, screw-shank, roofing tack—but all Reid really wanted to know was if he could use it.

It fit. Just barely, but it fit.

A bobby pin or paper clip would have been really helpful at this point. Why had he stopped wearing them on his cuffs?

Oh, that’s right. He’d thought at the FBI he wouldn’t need to pick as many locks as he’d once needed to in high school.

He took it out of the lock and pushed it down against the floor, hissing every time his grip slipped and the nail jammed under a fingernail. 45 degree arc, he thought every time he felt a nail crack under unexpected pressure, 45 degree arc and you’re out of the cuffs. Out of the dark.

Finally, it was ready and he started slowly tried the lock again. He applied steady pressure and twisted his wrist, but it wasn’t working. The lock would budge.

He took a deep breath and tried again. He felt the vibrations of the footsteps before he heard them, his fingers turning the nail back and forth faster and faster to find the release.

The sudden emergence of light blinded him for a moment, but he managed to palm the nail before being yanked harshly to his feet. He half-stumbled and was half-dragged down the hallway into the kitchen. There he pushed onto a wooden chair — focus! He reminded himself, gripping the nail tightly between his closed fingers — while the unsub paced.

“Perseus has come to visit,” the man muttered lowly. “But he has come without his gift. How rude.”

Reid forced his face to stay impassive, working the nail back into the handcuffs with renewed vigor. The lock stayed stubbornly closed.

The unsub stopped his pacing and knelt down to look Reid in the eye. “Mustn’t look her in the eye,” he said before giggling. “She gets angry, she does. I’ve got just the thing for you.”

Perseus? Reid supposed he would be flattered by the comparison at any other time. It’s not often he’s compared to the founder of Mycenae and the Perseid dynasty, the killer of the Gorgon Medusa and the first of the mythic heroes of Greek mythology. But the unsub’s insinuation that Medusa was somehow present in the house was … disturbing for lack of a better word.

Suddenly, the lock clicked audibly against his wrist and the unsub looked at Reid suspiciously.

“What kind of gift should I have brought Medusa?” he asked, surreptitiously moving on to work on the cuff still locked around his left wrist.

“Medusa?” the unsub asked scornfully. “Gift isn’t for _her_ , never for _her_. It’s for them, for showing what’s ugly on the inside on the outside.”

Reid wondered what this man’s trigger had been. The house was too large for a single man—it was a neighborhood for families. The small, ceramic animals playing in the cabinet were unlikely to belong to the unkempt man in front of him, oversized tee-shirt stained, unshaven, fingernails dirty. Not the type of man to carefully arrange pouncing kittens around mugs.

Reid wondered if his wife had left, or merely threatened to leave.

He wondered what they’d find when they examined the laurel tree in the front yard, the one with Daphne, tortured expression looking to the sky and praying for escape.

But the unsub had called him Perseus, a hero. Perhaps he could reason with the man. “You need to let me go,” he said quietly. “How can I complete my quest if I’m here?”

“Complete your quest?” the man asked incredulously. “So you can steal Andromeda from her promised? Oh just you wait….”

When the unsub turned to exit the kitchen, Reid jumped. His sudden weight caused the older man to stumble and fall to the ground. He knew he had little time — the man had physically overwhelmed Wright, who had close to thirty pounds of muscle on Reid. But Reid’s advantage had always been his mind and his speed.

As the man recovered and started lashing out, he caught Reid in the ribs with several powerful blows. Reid finally managed to fasten one end of his handcuffs to the unsubs’s heavy oak table and the other around his wrist. The unsub raged when he realized his new predicament, forgetting Reid entirely to pull against the table leg.

But it didn’t move.

Reid let out a relieved huff and looked around the room for a phone only to curse when he realized the cordless phone was not in its charger. He found it, oddly enough, nestled between a box of Count Chocula and a phonebook by the refrigerator. The table seemed to be holding up despite the man’s continued struggles, so he felt the risk was minimal enough to move out of the kitchen, out of sight of that wooden chair—so reminiscent of the one in Georgia—and into the hallway.

He dialed the number gingerly, mindful of his cracked and bleeding fingernails, and waited.

“Agent Hotchner.”

Finally. Reid breathed deeply for the first time since this all started, the action reminding him painfully of the blows the unsub had landed. “Hotch? It’s me. I found our unsub.”

  



End file.
